Despite the efforts of festivals around the world, releasing and distribution companies, and streaming channels, which have gotten rather more intense during the last few years, the majority of titles produced in Japan, S. Korea and Hong Kong, which number hundreds every year remain unknown, particularly to the Western audience. As such, we decided to focus on this type of films exactly for our April-May tribute. And to be totally sincere, not all will be great just definitely worth watching. Here is the first batch
1. Three Resurrected Drunkards (1969) by Nagisa Oshima (Japan)
“Three Resurrected Drunkards” is an excellent sample of the cinematic tendencies of both Oshima and a whole group that tried to renovate cinema during the end of the 60s and the 70s, by combining new cinematic approaches with pointed sociopolitical commentary. The result definitely demands some knowledge of the climate of the era and the overall mentality of the Japanese towards foreigners,...
1. Three Resurrected Drunkards (1969) by Nagisa Oshima (Japan)
“Three Resurrected Drunkards” is an excellent sample of the cinematic tendencies of both Oshima and a whole group that tried to renovate cinema during the end of the 60s and the 70s, by combining new cinematic approaches with pointed sociopolitical commentary. The result definitely demands some knowledge of the climate of the era and the overall mentality of the Japanese towards foreigners,...
- 4/19/2024
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
The issue of the Zainichi Koreans was one that interested Nagisa Oshima significantly, with him having shot the TV documentary “Forgotten Soldiers” in 1963 and the experimental short “Diary of Yunbogi” in 1965. Two events revolving around the problems of Koreans in Japan, the Kim Hiro and the Komatsugawa Incident, were also roots of inspiration for him, resulting in two films, “Death by Hanging” and “Three Resurrected Drunkards” both of which use irony, theatricality and intense avant-garde elements to portray his take on the subject.
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
The overall directorial approach here becomes apparent from the beginning, as it shows three Japanese students at the beach, reenacting one of the most famous pictures of the Vietnam war, before they decide to strip to their underwear and go for a swim. While they are swimming, a hand emerges from the sand and steals their clothes,...
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
The overall directorial approach here becomes apparent from the beginning, as it shows three Japanese students at the beach, reenacting one of the most famous pictures of the Vietnam war, before they decide to strip to their underwear and go for a swim. While they are swimming, a hand emerges from the sand and steals their clothes,...
- 4/13/2024
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Allow me to start with a very personal note. I think that the 60s and early 70s was the most interesting period in the history of Japanese cinema, with the avant-garde approach that emerged at the time resulting in some of the most unique films ever to see the light of day. At the same time, and considering that the majority of works about Japanese cinema history we get our hands in the West are written by Western writers, it is always interesting to see how much more light locals can shed on the subject. Lastly, and in the same path, considering that the “Aesthetics of Shadow” by Daisuke Miyao was truly masterful, I was really eager to read “Cinema of Actuality”.
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
After a prologue, which is, as usual in academic works, the most complicated part in the whole book,...
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
After a prologue, which is, as usual in academic works, the most complicated part in the whole book,...
- 3/30/2024
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
One of the newest trends in the documentary scene is a rather evident effort to move away from the traditional approach of the medium and move towards more artistic paths (although not as avant-garde as Japanese filmmakers like Terayama and Oshima did the past), which linger somewhere between the experimental and the fictitious. This approach has become quite evident this year in Thessaloniki, with “From Abdul to Leila” being a prominent sample of this tendency.
From Abdul to Leila is screening at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
The titular Leila Albayati is a Franco-Iraqi, who, after hearing for years her father, Abdul, a former member of the Baath party, telling stories about Iraq, decided to visit the country when she was 18, when the country was under embargo and no planes were landing. However, something terrible happened to her there, with the film hinting on the fact until the revelation close to the end,...
From Abdul to Leila is screening at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
The titular Leila Albayati is a Franco-Iraqi, who, after hearing for years her father, Abdul, a former member of the Baath party, telling stories about Iraq, decided to visit the country when she was 18, when the country was under embargo and no planes were landing. However, something terrible happened to her there, with the film hinting on the fact until the revelation close to the end,...
- 3/17/2024
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Clay McLeod Chapman And Andrea Mutti Conjure The New Horror Series “SÉANCE In The Asylum”: "We’re receiving a message from the beyond! Dark Horse Comics presents Séance in the Asylum, a new historical horror series from renowned writer Clay McLeod Chapman and artist Andrea Mutti that will have you questioning what’s real and what’s not. Chapman will write the series and Mutti will illustrate, with Trevor Henderson, Francesco Francavilla, Lukas Ketner, and Jenna Cha rounding out the circle and providing variant cover art on issues #1-4.
“Years back, I uncovered an esoteric text -- The Homeopathic Principle Applied to Insanity: A Proposal to Treat Lunacy by Spiritualism by Dr. James John Garth Wilkinson -- written all the way back in 1857, and I knew within my bones, my blood, that this was destined to be a story,” said Chapman. “As a lifelong acolyte of the Fox Sisters,...
“Years back, I uncovered an esoteric text -- The Homeopathic Principle Applied to Insanity: A Proposal to Treat Lunacy by Spiritualism by Dr. James John Garth Wilkinson -- written all the way back in 1857, and I knew within my bones, my blood, that this was destined to be a story,” said Chapman. “As a lifelong acolyte of the Fox Sisters,...
- 3/15/2024
- by Jonathan James
- DailyDead
Adam Devine, J.K. Simmons, Sam Richardson and Elsie Fisher will lend their voices to “Hypergalactic,” the CG animated family feature co-created by Naoto Oshima, best known for designing the original “Sonic the Hedgehog” for Sega, and Joseph Chou.
The English-language film, directed by David N. Weiss and now in post-production, marks the most ambition CG feature to date from Toei Animation. The Japanese studio was behind recent anime smash hits “The First Slam Dunk,” which grossed $279 million, and “One Piece Film: Red,” which has so far earned $246.6 million.
Charades are set to launch worldwide sales on “Hypergalatic” at Berlin’s European Film Market, alongside Iwashina Corporation founder Kevin Iwashina, who is also an advisor to Toei.
“Hypergalactic” follows an adventurous teenage girl (Fisher) and her baby brother in the not-so-distant future, after they liberate the forgotten protector of Earth, Ohkan (Devine), in the hopes that he can help reunite them with their missing parents.
The English-language film, directed by David N. Weiss and now in post-production, marks the most ambition CG feature to date from Toei Animation. The Japanese studio was behind recent anime smash hits “The First Slam Dunk,” which grossed $279 million, and “One Piece Film: Red,” which has so far earned $246.6 million.
Charades are set to launch worldwide sales on “Hypergalatic” at Berlin’s European Film Market, alongside Iwashina Corporation founder Kevin Iwashina, who is also an advisor to Toei.
“Hypergalactic” follows an adventurous teenage girl (Fisher) and her baby brother in the not-so-distant future, after they liberate the forgotten protector of Earth, Ohkan (Devine), in the hopes that he can help reunite them with their missing parents.
- 2/6/2024
- by Alex Ritman
- Variety Film + TV
Leading Japanese animation studio Toei Animation has announced family feature Hypergalactic, describing the production as its biggest and most ambitious CGI film to date.
The story and characters are co-created by top Japanese artist Naoto Oshima, who designed the hit global franchise Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega, and Joseph Chou, whose credits include Blade Runner 2022: Black Out, Ghost in the Shell and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
The English-language animated family feature is directed by David N. Weiss, whose credits include Shrek 2, The Smurfs and Smurfs 2.
The movie will feature the voice talents of Adam Devine, Elsie Fisher, J.K. Simmons and Sam Richardson.
The family film follows an adventurous teenage girl (Fisher) and her baby brother in the not-so-distant future, after they liberate the forgotten protector of Earth,...
The story and characters are co-created by top Japanese artist Naoto Oshima, who designed the hit global franchise Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega, and Joseph Chou, whose credits include Blade Runner 2022: Black Out, Ghost in the Shell and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
The English-language animated family feature is directed by David N. Weiss, whose credits include Shrek 2, The Smurfs and Smurfs 2.
The movie will feature the voice talents of Adam Devine, Elsie Fisher, J.K. Simmons and Sam Richardson.
The family film follows an adventurous teenage girl (Fisher) and her baby brother in the not-so-distant future, after they liberate the forgotten protector of Earth,...
- 2/6/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Japanese anime giant Toei Animation (One Piece Film: Red, The First Slam Dunk) is teaming with Sonic the Hedgehog game designer Naoto Oshima, Shrek 2 and The Smurfs writer David N. Weiss and acclaimed animation producer Joseph Chou (Ghost in the Shell, Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim) on the English-language animated feature Hypergalactic.
Weiss will direct Hypergalatic with the story and characters co-created by Oshima and Chou. Toei is calling the film its biggest CGI project to date. The Japanese studio is flying high on the success of animated sports drama The First Slam Dunk, which has earned more than $279 million worldwide, and One Piece Film: Red, which has grossed more than $246 million globally.
Adam Devine, Elsie Fisher, J.K. Simmons and Sam Richardson have joined the voice cast of the English-language production. Charades is representing worldwide rights and will launch sales at the European Film Market (EFM...
Weiss will direct Hypergalatic with the story and characters co-created by Oshima and Chou. Toei is calling the film its biggest CGI project to date. The Japanese studio is flying high on the success of animated sports drama The First Slam Dunk, which has earned more than $279 million worldwide, and One Piece Film: Red, which has grossed more than $246 million globally.
Adam Devine, Elsie Fisher, J.K. Simmons and Sam Richardson have joined the voice cast of the English-language production. Charades is representing worldwide rights and will launch sales at the European Film Market (EFM...
- 2/6/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Sousou No Frieren has gained quite the popularity after its anime adaptation by Madhouse aired in 2023. It was praised for its poignant story and incredible animation.
The anime has made the top spot in Mal ranking its own for over a month, suggesting that its meteoric rise is not something short lived. In fact, thanks to the anime’s popularity, the manga volume circulation increased from 10 million copies in October 2023 to 17 million copies in December 2023.
In light of Frieren’s newfound fame, a comment made by Weekly Shonen Sunday Editor-in-Chief Kazunori Oshima has come to light regarding the popularity of the series.
This comment was revealed by Shogakukan’s veteran editor Katsuya Shirai in an interview with fellow industry veteran Kazuhiko Torishima.
Shirai and Torishima were discussing the competitiveness and rivalry between manga publishers, with Shirai mentioning how he used to keep an eye out on other magazines to look...
The anime has made the top spot in Mal ranking its own for over a month, suggesting that its meteoric rise is not something short lived. In fact, thanks to the anime’s popularity, the manga volume circulation increased from 10 million copies in October 2023 to 17 million copies in December 2023.
In light of Frieren’s newfound fame, a comment made by Weekly Shonen Sunday Editor-in-Chief Kazunori Oshima has come to light regarding the popularity of the series.
This comment was revealed by Shogakukan’s veteran editor Katsuya Shirai in an interview with fellow industry veteran Kazuhiko Torishima.
Shirai and Torishima were discussing the competitiveness and rivalry between manga publishers, with Shirai mentioning how he used to keep an eye out on other magazines to look...
- 12/28/2023
- by A.R. Madillo
- AnimeHunch
Signaling the 10th anniversary since the introduction of Art Theatre Guild, “The Ceremony” is one of the best works of Nagisa Oshima and one of those films that highlights how multilayered, both audiovisuallly and contextually, cinema can be. The movie won multiple awards in 1972, both from Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Concours.
Follow our coverage of Atg by clicking on the link below
The story begins with Masuo Sakurada, a young man, receiving a shocking telegram from his cousin Terumichi. Not sure if it is true or not, he embarks on a trip towards his cousin's cabin, along with his cousin Ritsuko, in order to discover the truth. As the fact that, for him, Ritsuko is more than a relative, the terrible story of the Sakuradas also comes to the fore, as the trip proves to be also one down a terrible memory lane.
In that fashion, the movie unfolds in three axes.
Follow our coverage of Atg by clicking on the link below
The story begins with Masuo Sakurada, a young man, receiving a shocking telegram from his cousin Terumichi. Not sure if it is true or not, he embarks on a trip towards his cousin's cabin, along with his cousin Ritsuko, in order to discover the truth. As the fact that, for him, Ritsuko is more than a relative, the terrible story of the Sakuradas also comes to the fore, as the trip proves to be also one down a terrible memory lane.
In that fashion, the movie unfolds in three axes.
- 8/21/2023
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Blind Beast.You could start cradled like the kidnapped woman in the undulating foam curves that resemble a gigantic female torso in Blind Beast (1969). You could make your approach via the swing of a Super-8 camera towards the steps of a courthouse at the beginning of A Wife Confesses (1961). You could drift into A Cheerful Girl (1957) through the kitchen window, onto a table laden with groceries and bottles of fluorescent orange soda-pop. You could inject yourself like morphine into Red Angel (1966), seep like body ink into the skin of Spider Tattoo (1966), or slide into the fevered bloodstream of All Mixed Up (1964) like powdered poison swallowed from a kite-paper pouch. Whether you arrive on the tip of a blade or the cusp of a kiss, there is no wrong place to start with Yasuzo Masumura, the postwar Japanese director whose astonishing accomplishment should by rights have him mentioned in the same...
- 8/15/2023
- MUBI
At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 37 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.
It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year,...
It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year,...
- 7/8/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
by Palomo Lin-Linares
How does one categorize the films of Nagisa Oshima? Even among his brethren new wave directors, he stands as an auteur independent of any particular movement. “Japanese Summer: Double Suicide,” in all its absurdism, provocation, and politically charged imagery, is a perfect example of Oshima's non-conformist method of expression.
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
The film opens with a series of left hook vignettes, connected by cultural imagery which serve as an introduction to the film's language and style. Nejiko, a young sexually obsessed woman (Keiko Sakurai) meets Otoko, a man obsessed with death (Kei Sato). This pseudo romance is interrupted when the couple are taken prisoner by mysterious gangsters and placed in a hideaway. Here they meet the rest of the movie's characters that are composed of equally obsessed oddballs: a television loving fascist, a trigger happy kid, an anarchist,...
How does one categorize the films of Nagisa Oshima? Even among his brethren new wave directors, he stands as an auteur independent of any particular movement. “Japanese Summer: Double Suicide,” in all its absurdism, provocation, and politically charged imagery, is a perfect example of Oshima's non-conformist method of expression.
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
The film opens with a series of left hook vignettes, connected by cultural imagery which serve as an introduction to the film's language and style. Nejiko, a young sexually obsessed woman (Keiko Sakurai) meets Otoko, a man obsessed with death (Kei Sato). This pseudo romance is interrupted when the couple are taken prisoner by mysterious gangsters and placed in a hideaway. Here they meet the rest of the movie's characters that are composed of equally obsessed oddballs: a television loving fascist, a trigger happy kid, an anarchist,...
- 5/21/2023
- by Guest Writer
- AsianMoviePulse
NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.
Film Forum
A retrospective on New York movies is underway, featuring Polanski, Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Hitchcock; Fellini’s early masterwork I Vitelloni continues screening; The Muppets Take Manhattan plays this Sunday.
Film at Lincoln Center
“The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” brings films directed and curated by the Thai master (who we talked to about the retrospective), among them work from Oshima, Kiarostami, Cassavetes and more.
Museum of Modern Art
A Rialto Pictures retrospective offers a smorgasbord of classic films, including Grand Illusion, Army of Shadows, and The Conversation on 35mm.
Museum of the Moving Image
Steven Spielberg’s greatest film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, plays on 35mm this Friday and Saturday while a series on summer movies continues with The Omen.
Japan Society
One of Japan’s greatest directors, Shinji Somai, is subject of a retrospective that continues with...
Film Forum
A retrospective on New York movies is underway, featuring Polanski, Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Hitchcock; Fellini’s early masterwork I Vitelloni continues screening; The Muppets Take Manhattan plays this Sunday.
Film at Lincoln Center
“The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” brings films directed and curated by the Thai master (who we talked to about the retrospective), among them work from Oshima, Kiarostami, Cassavetes and more.
Museum of Modern Art
A Rialto Pictures retrospective offers a smorgasbord of classic films, including Grand Illusion, Army of Shadows, and The Conversation on 35mm.
Museum of the Moving Image
Steven Spielberg’s greatest film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, plays on 35mm this Friday and Saturday while a series on summer movies continues with The Omen.
Japan Society
One of Japan’s greatest directors, Shinji Somai, is subject of a retrospective that continues with...
- 5/12/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
There are more than enough corpses to fill a cemetery once the smoke clears in Yakuza Graveyard, but in Fukasaku Kinji’s caustic thriller national honor is the central casualty. With Japan’s severe economical crisis spreading across both sides of the law, a shooting can become a transaction. “If you kill someone, you owe damages” is how a drug-addicted prostitute justifies detective Kuroiwa’s (Watari Tetsuya) responsibility for her after he’s killed her pimp—just one of the film’s many relationships defined in business as opposed to moral terms.
Assigned to the local crime beat to cool his rogue-cop jets, Kuroiwa quickly finds himself wedged between the Nishida and Ushin families, warring yakuza groups with unsavory links to the police department. His allies include Iwata (Umemiya Tetsuo), a bellicose underworld torpedo with whom the detective bonds over bruises, booze, and Yankee hookers, and Lady Snowblood herself, Kaji Meiko,...
Assigned to the local crime beat to cool his rogue-cop jets, Kuroiwa quickly finds himself wedged between the Nishida and Ushin families, warring yakuza groups with unsavory links to the police department. His allies include Iwata (Umemiya Tetsuo), a bellicose underworld torpedo with whom the detective bonds over bruises, booze, and Yankee hookers, and Lady Snowblood herself, Kaji Meiko,...
- 5/2/2023
- by Fernando F. Croce
- Slant Magazine
The world mourns the loss of a man behind some of the most beautiful, mesmerizing, and transcendent music ever composed. On March 23rd, 2023, renowned composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away at 71. The cause of death was cancer, something he had battled for quite some time. Since his early days as a member and founder of the “Yellow Magic Orchestra,” Sakamoto demonstrated range as a composer and would be an influential figure covering a wide range of genres from electronic to classical. His work has often been fittingly described as atmospheric, emotional, hypnotic, beautiful, and majestic. He was also open about being an environmentalist, studying world culture, and advocating for peace. Journalists Gigova and Orie, in an article on CNN's website, detail his activism stating, “Outside music, Sakamoto was known for activism — and in particular for his anti-nuclear views, which saw him demonstrating against nuclear power plants and co-organizing a “No Nukes...
- 4/22/2023
- by Sean Barry
- AsianMoviePulse
Lauded Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto died on March 28 at the age of 71, recording company Avex announced on Sunday. “While undergoing treatment for cancer discovered in June 2020, Sakamoto continued to create works in his home studio whenever his heath would allow,” the statement read. “He lived with music until the very end.”
In the 1970s, Sakamoto was a member of the influential electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra, which released hit songs including “Yellow Magic (Tong Poo)” and “Technopolis.”
He made his film composing debut with 1983’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and later composed the score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film “The Last Emperor,” for which he earned the Best Original Score Oscar. His other film scores included Pedro Almodóvar’s “Tacones Iejanos,” Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” and “Femme Fatale,” Oliver Stone’s “Wild Palms,” Oshima’s “Gohatto” and Alejandro G. Iñàrritu’s “The Revenant.”
A documentary about Sakamoto’s life and work,...
In the 1970s, Sakamoto was a member of the influential electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra, which released hit songs including “Yellow Magic (Tong Poo)” and “Technopolis.”
He made his film composing debut with 1983’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and later composed the score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film “The Last Emperor,” for which he earned the Best Original Score Oscar. His other film scores included Pedro Almodóvar’s “Tacones Iejanos,” Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” and “Femme Fatale,” Oliver Stone’s “Wild Palms,” Oshima’s “Gohatto” and Alejandro G. Iñàrritu’s “The Revenant.”
A documentary about Sakamoto’s life and work,...
- 4/2/2023
- by Adam Chitwood
- The Wrap
Graduating as Ozu’s assistant with his debut feature-length at Shochiku in 1960, Masahiro Shinoda (b. 1931) saw the dawn of the Japanese New Wave and rose to prominence alongside the likes of Nagisa Oshima, Yasuzo Masumura, Koreyoshi Kurahara, and Shohei Imamura among a whole host of others. Though he would spend most of his career reinterpreting and reimagining whole genres including the yakuza film and jidaigeki, the films across his four-decade-long career would predominantly be united by a re-examination of Japanese historical, societal, and national identity, complete with a focus on alienation, mythologies, and religious and moral turmoil. Frequently coupled with composer Toru Takemitsu, cinematographers Masao Kosugi and Tatsuo Suzuki, and actress Shima Iwashita (whom he would go on to marry), Shinoda’s films grapple with man’s perturbing darkness and its effect on the personal and national conscience. Like most of his Nūberu Bāgu compatriots, Shinoda frequently negated cinematic and narrative traditions,...
- 2/22/2023
- by JC Cansdale-Cook
- AsianMoviePulse
The Great Italian Films of the 1970sThere was a certain type of great art film which was being made from 1968 through the 1970s which can never be approximated. Active and engaged filmmakers were consciously wakening out of the post-war amnesia and taking a perversely erotically charged political stand against the hypocrisy of the previous generation.
Italy was the hotbed of this examination of fascism coming out of World War II. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even the American musical, via Bob Fosse’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret (1972) hinted at what the Italians went after with their full force of creative muscle.
Take Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), set in Vienna in 1957, the film centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp officer (Dirk Bogarde) and one of his inmates (Charlotte Rampling). Their sadomasochistic love is their only happiness and it paralyzes the former Nazis who have been reintegrated into polite society.
Universally reviled by U.S.’s top critics, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times called it “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering”. Vincent Canby, prominent critic for The New York Times, called it “romantic pornography” and “a piece of junk”. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; The Night Porteroffers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.”
Susan Sontag’s essay Fascinating Facism for New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975) stated, “If the message of fascism has been neutralized by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualized. This eroticization of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and, more recently and far less interestingly, in Visconti’s The Damned and Cavani’s The Night Porter.”
However, its value was recognized by the executive producer Joseph E. Levine who quoted them on the posters of the U.S. theatrical release through his company Avco Embassy.
In a brilliant essay of the film by Kat Ellinger I quote:
Filmmakers were suddenly touching the untouchable, and it made certain people incredibly uncomfortable.”
Unlike Naziploitation, The Night Porter does nothing to cartoonise the Nazi officers that dominate the narrative. It isn’t a case of good versus evil, or that sadism is presented as a form of lasivious softcore pornography. Neither is the film a deliberate political treatise like the art films of Bertolucci, Visconti, or Pasolini. Its biggest transgression is that it humanises one of its main characters, Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former Nazi officer with a penchant for sadism, when he finds his ‘little girl’ again in the postwar period; a former concentration camp inmate Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) with whom he undertook a sadistic affair while she was incarcerated. On reuniting it is clear that their loved never died, so they continue, even though they know it will eventually contribute to their downfall and consequent death. Love in this realm is desperately profane, disgusting, something that should never be. And because of this it remains infinitely fascinating and uniquely humanistic.
Related in spirit was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), using sex to express the death of love and male causality, its own furor when it hit American cinemas still continues to court controversy; and Luchino Visconti’s The Innocent (1976), based upon the novel by the decadent writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, expressing the same but in a totally antithetical environment of the aristocracy. Bertolluci’s The Conformist(1970) twisted the repressed homosexual of its title into a sadomasochistic fascist.
One could say, as did Gabriel Jenkinson, “the dynamics of conformity present in the modern consumerist capitalist system result in repression, which in turn manifests as violent sadomasochism — and …if one does not actively rebel against this system, one is complicit in its proliferation.”
Parenthetically on the other side of the earth, in Japan, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) by Nagisa Ôshima about a woman whose affair with her master leads to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship also came out of Oshima’s early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto in ‘68 and out of his concern with the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society in which he exposed contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization.
In 2020 Vincent Canby might have revisited The Night Porter and seen it in a different light. His 2020 review of Visconti’s last film, L’innocente (The Innocent), completed in 1976 shortly before his death was “among the most beautiful and severely disciplined films he has ever made.” It was also brazenly sadistic and sexy to a point that today would be labeled pornographic, and today could not be conceived of, much less made, diving, as it does, into sex, abortion, male domination and violence.
According to The World, public radio’s longest-running daily global news program, a co-production of Prx and Wgbh, in 2012:
British scientists have finally confirmed what women worldwide have been suspecting for centuries. It’s not religious principles that start wars. It’s not even civilization’s thirst for oil. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the penis.
According to a study published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society publication, the male sex drive is the cause of most conflicts in the world, from soccer hooliganism to religious wars, not to mention family disputes over the toilet seat being left up.
According to this story in The Telegraph, the scientists call it the “male warrior instinct” and claim men are programmed to be aggressive toward outsiders. It apparently used to be a handy instinct, back when you had to kill other suitors in order to gain more access to mates, but nowadays, this only works in some countries and a few US cities. For the rest of us, this unreformed sex drive only means ever-increasing defense budgets.
The magnitude of this discovery is so great, it’s difficult to estimate the potential ramifications.
At only eight inches on average (or that’s what we have been told), it’s smaller in size than most other controversial discoveries, yet — just like the atom — it has catastrophic consequences if in the hands of the wrong people.
And so these filmmakers show us the pathological drive of the unleashed male libido.
But times are different in the 21st century. These films could never be approximated by our Tik Tok generation where porn has created a quick witty and essentially violent vibrato of sexuality. These films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s took the libido at its rawest and showed its drive as an expression of political evil in very different types of stories.
And it might be worth noting that of all these films, the most reviled was written and directed by a woman and in most of the films, it is, in fact, a woman who proves the stronger of the two sexes and disarms the man. What remains viscerally true to this day is that that missile shaped 8 inch organ needs to be beaten into a plowshare.
SexFascismMoviesItalyInternational Film...
Italy was the hotbed of this examination of fascism coming out of World War II. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even the American musical, via Bob Fosse’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret (1972) hinted at what the Italians went after with their full force of creative muscle.
Take Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), set in Vienna in 1957, the film centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp officer (Dirk Bogarde) and one of his inmates (Charlotte Rampling). Their sadomasochistic love is their only happiness and it paralyzes the former Nazis who have been reintegrated into polite society.
Universally reviled by U.S.’s top critics, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times called it “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering”. Vincent Canby, prominent critic for The New York Times, called it “romantic pornography” and “a piece of junk”. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; The Night Porteroffers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.”
Susan Sontag’s essay Fascinating Facism for New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975) stated, “If the message of fascism has been neutralized by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualized. This eroticization of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and, more recently and far less interestingly, in Visconti’s The Damned and Cavani’s The Night Porter.”
However, its value was recognized by the executive producer Joseph E. Levine who quoted them on the posters of the U.S. theatrical release through his company Avco Embassy.
In a brilliant essay of the film by Kat Ellinger I quote:
Filmmakers were suddenly touching the untouchable, and it made certain people incredibly uncomfortable.”
Unlike Naziploitation, The Night Porter does nothing to cartoonise the Nazi officers that dominate the narrative. It isn’t a case of good versus evil, or that sadism is presented as a form of lasivious softcore pornography. Neither is the film a deliberate political treatise like the art films of Bertolucci, Visconti, or Pasolini. Its biggest transgression is that it humanises one of its main characters, Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former Nazi officer with a penchant for sadism, when he finds his ‘little girl’ again in the postwar period; a former concentration camp inmate Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) with whom he undertook a sadistic affair while she was incarcerated. On reuniting it is clear that their loved never died, so they continue, even though they know it will eventually contribute to their downfall and consequent death. Love in this realm is desperately profane, disgusting, something that should never be. And because of this it remains infinitely fascinating and uniquely humanistic.
Related in spirit was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), using sex to express the death of love and male causality, its own furor when it hit American cinemas still continues to court controversy; and Luchino Visconti’s The Innocent (1976), based upon the novel by the decadent writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, expressing the same but in a totally antithetical environment of the aristocracy. Bertolluci’s The Conformist(1970) twisted the repressed homosexual of its title into a sadomasochistic fascist.
One could say, as did Gabriel Jenkinson, “the dynamics of conformity present in the modern consumerist capitalist system result in repression, which in turn manifests as violent sadomasochism — and …if one does not actively rebel against this system, one is complicit in its proliferation.”
Parenthetically on the other side of the earth, in Japan, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) by Nagisa Ôshima about a woman whose affair with her master leads to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship also came out of Oshima’s early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto in ‘68 and out of his concern with the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society in which he exposed contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization.
In 2020 Vincent Canby might have revisited The Night Porter and seen it in a different light. His 2020 review of Visconti’s last film, L’innocente (The Innocent), completed in 1976 shortly before his death was “among the most beautiful and severely disciplined films he has ever made.” It was also brazenly sadistic and sexy to a point that today would be labeled pornographic, and today could not be conceived of, much less made, diving, as it does, into sex, abortion, male domination and violence.
According to The World, public radio’s longest-running daily global news program, a co-production of Prx and Wgbh, in 2012:
British scientists have finally confirmed what women worldwide have been suspecting for centuries. It’s not religious principles that start wars. It’s not even civilization’s thirst for oil. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the penis.
According to a study published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society publication, the male sex drive is the cause of most conflicts in the world, from soccer hooliganism to religious wars, not to mention family disputes over the toilet seat being left up.
According to this story in The Telegraph, the scientists call it the “male warrior instinct” and claim men are programmed to be aggressive toward outsiders. It apparently used to be a handy instinct, back when you had to kill other suitors in order to gain more access to mates, but nowadays, this only works in some countries and a few US cities. For the rest of us, this unreformed sex drive only means ever-increasing defense budgets.
The magnitude of this discovery is so great, it’s difficult to estimate the potential ramifications.
At only eight inches on average (or that’s what we have been told), it’s smaller in size than most other controversial discoveries, yet — just like the atom — it has catastrophic consequences if in the hands of the wrong people.
And so these filmmakers show us the pathological drive of the unleashed male libido.
But times are different in the 21st century. These films could never be approximated by our Tik Tok generation where porn has created a quick witty and essentially violent vibrato of sexuality. These films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s took the libido at its rawest and showed its drive as an expression of political evil in very different types of stories.
And it might be worth noting that of all these films, the most reviled was written and directed by a woman and in most of the films, it is, in fact, a woman who proves the stronger of the two sexes and disarms the man. What remains viscerally true to this day is that that missile shaped 8 inch organ needs to be beaten into a plowshare.
SexFascismMoviesItalyInternational Film...
- 2/11/2023
- by Sydney
- Sydney's Buzz
Film director Yoshida Kiju (formerly Yoshida Yoshishige) died on Thursday of pneumonia at age 89, Japanese media sources have revealed.
Together with Oshima Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro, Yoshida was part of the Shochiku-backed Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s that had a major impact on Japanese cinema both then and in succeeding decades.
A graduate of the elite University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida joined the Shochiku studio in 1955 and served as assistant director to Ozu Yasujiro and Kinoshita Keisuke.
In 1960 he made his directorial debut with the youth drama “Good-for-Nothing.” This and his following films “Blood Is Dry” (1960) and “Bitter End of a Sweet Night,” with their unsparing depictions of contemporary social ills, marked Yoshida, together with fellow Shochiku up-and-comers Oshima and Shinoda, as rebels against studio convention. The trio came to be grouped under the label Shochiku Nouvelle Vague, a nod to...
Together with Oshima Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro, Yoshida was part of the Shochiku-backed Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s that had a major impact on Japanese cinema both then and in succeeding decades.
A graduate of the elite University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida joined the Shochiku studio in 1955 and served as assistant director to Ozu Yasujiro and Kinoshita Keisuke.
In 1960 he made his directorial debut with the youth drama “Good-for-Nothing.” This and his following films “Blood Is Dry” (1960) and “Bitter End of a Sweet Night,” with their unsparing depictions of contemporary social ills, marked Yoshida, together with fellow Shochiku up-and-comers Oshima and Shinoda, as rebels against studio convention. The trio came to be grouped under the label Shochiku Nouvelle Vague, a nod to...
- 12/9/2022
- by Mark Schilling
- Variety Film + TV
Keirin is a form of motor-paced cycle racing in which track cyclists sprint for victory following a speed-controlled start behind a motorized or non-motorized pacer. It was developed in Japan around 1948 for gambling purposes and became an official event at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Tamano is a seaside city located in southern Okayama Prefecture, Japan. It was officially founded on August 3, 1940 and as of October 1, 2016, has an estimated population of 60,101. Tetsuichiro Tsuta brings the two concepts together, in a style that looks at least partially promotional for both, to present three rather differently styled segments in his omnibus, which marks his first feature after 2013 and “The Tale of Iya”.
Tamano Visual Poetry: Nagisa’s Bicycle is screening at Camera Japan
The first part, titled “Bicycle Racing” focuses on Oshima, a middle-aged, quite bulky bicycle racer, who is having a midlife crisis since he has to gradually leave the...
Tamano Visual Poetry: Nagisa’s Bicycle is screening at Camera Japan
The first part, titled “Bicycle Racing” focuses on Oshima, a middle-aged, quite bulky bicycle racer, who is having a midlife crisis since he has to gradually leave the...
- 10/2/2022
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
During the 60’s, Oshima exhibited a rivalry towards Japanese cinema, which was actually rooted to his hatred for the movies of Ozu and Mizoguchi, whose films he considered as “… made to be acceptable to the Japanese because they were based upon a familiarity with general concepts readily understandable by the Japanese…”. This dislike extended to the whole of the industry and thus, since 1960 and “Night and Fog” (whose purpose was to challenge the aforementioned trend and the industry in general), Oshima kept his distance from the major studios and particularly Shochiku, at the same time offering to the audience a new kind of cinema with a distinct political hue, that very few have experienced up to that point. “Death by Hanging” is the apogee of this tendency.
“Death by Hanging” is screening at InlanDimensions
The film is based on the real but rather extreme case of Ri Chin’u,...
“Death by Hanging” is screening at InlanDimensions
The film is based on the real but rather extreme case of Ri Chin’u,...
- 9/21/2022
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
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